Dating and the almighty dollar, er, credit score

Good afternoon and welcome back to TechCrunch PM, your source for startup, venture capital and Big Tech news of the day. For your reading pleasure, we bring you a dating app that is quite exclusive, quite a bit of electric vehicle news — even one on fire — some new venture capital funds and how to have an awesome go-to-market pitch slide.

 — Christine

TechCrunch PM Top 3

Excellent credit = a chance to Score: If you thought your partner was only in it for the money, you might be right. And especially if you found them on Score, a “pop-up” dating app for people with good to excellent credit. Money is traditionally what couples fight about often, however, this is quite the strategy.

This car was on fire: A Waymo robotaxi was vandalized and burned in San Francisco in what people later said was in protest of autonomous vehicles.

Fewer companies want robots: The number of industrial robot orders dropped nearly one-third last year, according to a new study. To be fair, sales had been falling for much of the year, especially after two years of record activity. However, it’s cause for concern among robotics manufacturers about the state of the industry.

More top reads

New funds alert: Homebrew is raising a $50 million fund, while over in Switzerland, Wingman Ventures has a new name and is targeting $120 million for its latest fund.

More car talk: In addition to the Waymo car fire discussed above, we have an item on the U.S. government’s view that Lucid isn’t doing enough to fix its windshield defroster problem and that Jeep’s parent company is the latest to adopt Tesla’s electric vehicle charging standard. Speaking of autonomous cars, Cruise named its first chief safety officer, a role we can all agree was probably a bit late in coming.

A new revenue stream for developers: More than half of the apps being developed specifically for the Apple Vision Pro are paid downloads, which means developers can get paid without having to keep up with a subscription model.

Keeping tabs on space junk: The movie “Wall-E” wasn‘t just a clever idea. Thankfully, LeoLabs is keeping a close eye on all of the space junk out there — and has new capital, to boot. 

What’s new at Spotify: Spotify for Podcasters added a new integration with Riverside, which gives podcasters a way to record and edit their audio and video podcasts with Riverside inside the Spotify for Podcasters web product. It also sunsets some legacy podcasting tools.

What have large language models done for you lately?: For Motif Analytics, a lot. Now buoyed by new funding, the company is leveraging LLMs to tell growth teams what their metrics are actually saying.

Pulling at Threads: Last week, social media site Threads said it would not actively recommend political content; however, the company today announced it would test a new trends feature called “topics,” where such content could potentially surface anyway. 

Going to market? That particular slide better be awesome: Investors want to give you capital, however, they won’t if you don’t understand your customer or how you plan to grow.

On the pods

Today’s Equity brings a mix of technology, politics and AI stories. This week is another big week of quarterly earnings from the likes of HubSpot, Instacart, Monday.com and Cisco, which should give us some insight on the state of software and hardware sales in 2023. Alex also took a look at crypto prices, more about the Waymo car fire, a mega venture round and AI work in Silicon Valley. Listen here.

• Sr Application Developer at Game Creek Video (Hudson, NH, USA)
• Head of Marketing at 3Forge LLC (New York, NY, USA)
• Sr. Data Engineer (USAFacts) at USAFacts (Bellevue, WA, USA)
• Founding Data Engineer (Staff / Principal) at Everyday Agents (San Francisco, CA 94105, United States)
• Founding AI/ML Platform Engineer (Staff / Principal) at Everyday Agents (San Francisco, CA 94105, United States)

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